“This Is Censorship”: W.S.J. Editor Tamps Down on This “Income Inequality” Nonsense

Ten years ago this month, investment bank Bear Stearns was consigned to the scrap heap of corporate history, an event that would become one of the first dots on the timeline of the global financial crisis. To commemorate the anniversary, a team at The Wall Street Journal put together a feature about how the world has (and hasn’t) changed since the crisis. It’s an informative piece! Some of the things it reveals are that:

Wall Street pay has bounced back from its “post-crisis lows”;

Happy days are here again for bank stocks;

Virtually all of Donald Trump’s regulators are now enforcing the industries that made them rich;

The financial sector has once again become a larger segment of the economy, which “could translate to future risks for borrowers and consumers in another crisis”; and,

Income inequality has increased sharply, with the top 1 percent controlling 38.7 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2016, up from 33.7 percent in 2007. On the other end, the bottom 90 percent share just 22.8 percent of the country’s wealth, down from 28.6 percent in 2007.

None of which, apparently, a top editor at The Wall Street Journal wanted people to know, according to an e-mail that was circulated among staffers and the media earlier today, which read:

This week a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal attempted to take a graphic offline because the facts it contained were not politically palatable. When that failed, it was “de-surfaced,” or, in other terms, taken off the front page and links were removed to it from as many places as possible. After an early flurry of traffic, views plummeted. This is censorship and it is beneath the standards of The Wall Street Journal. It isn’t the first time, either.

We propose “resurfacing” the graphic far and wide. Please share it with anyone you can, on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, or any other platform.

Separately, we propose a massive tweet of the graphic at 12 p.m. (EST) / 5 p.m. (GMT) / 12 a.m. (Hong Kong). Please forward this message to anyone who you believe shares these values. Please forward this, whether in part or full to as many people at the W.S.J. as possible.

It’s not clear which “senior editor” allegedly took issue with the piece, though Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica reporter Jesse Eisinger, a Journal alum, has heard it was editor-in-chief Gerry Baker, which doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility given the fact that, over the past year, Baker—whose name was once in the mix to fill a top spot at Fox News—has come under fire from Journal staff for running the paper like it‘s Trump’s own personal P.R. shop. As my colleague Joe Pompeo has reported, there’s an overwhelming feeling among those at the paper that, since Trump descended from an escalator to announce his candidacy for president, Baker has been resistant to stories that are critical of the ex-Miss Universe owner and has “tweak[ed] . . . stories to make them less aggressive toward the president.”

Last August, a transcript of an interview between Baker and the Trump was leaked to Politico showing the editor shmoozing it up with Trump and Ivanka in a manner that gave readers a raging case of second-hand embarrassment. And it’s been on Baker’s watch that the paper’s editorial board—long known for being more conservative than its newsroom—has morphed into “a different level of crazy,” wherein claims are being made that Robert Mueller “lacks the critical distance to conduct a credible probe” and mustachioed crackpots are calling for pre-emptive strikes on North Korea. With Trump reportedly mulling another round of tax cuts that would overwhelming benefit corporate America and the wealthy, now is clearly not the time to tip the 99 percent off to the fact that the rich are doing just fine.

In a statement, The Wall Street Journal told the Hive: “This project first published Tuesday morning and has been online ever since. The team will be adding additional reporting and analysis on the crisis and its aftermath.”

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Trump makes it clear he could go all Fatal Attraction on Amazon at any moment

Yesterday, after reports surfaced that the president of the United States is “obsessed with Amazon” and “wondered aloud if there may be any way to go after [the company] with anti-trust or competition law,” the White House said it had “no announcements and no specific policies or actions that we’re currently pushing forward [now on Amazon].” But that obviously didn’t sit right with Trump, who took to Twitter on Thursday to make it clear that he’s still raring to go:

The British lender was the only bank to push back against the size of the settlement demanded by the Justice Department, prompting the prosecutor to file a lawsuit in the waning days of the Obama administration in 2016. The DOJ wanted a fine of about $5 billion, but the bank refused to pay any more than $2 billion, Bloomberg news reported in 2016 . . . Barclays Chief Executive Officer Jes Staley’s gamble to face down the DOJ paid off. Big banks typically negotiate a settlement rather than risk a protracted and reputation-damaging courtroom showdown with U.S. lawyers. While Staley chose to fight, JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon said he “had no choice” but to “surrender,” agreeing to pay $13 billion to settle similar accusations.

“The settlement came at the bottom end of expectations and much sooner than expected,” Ian Gordon, an analyst at Investec Plc, told Bloomberg, calling it a “clear positive” and a “very happy Easter” for the bank.

Of course Scott Pruitt was living in an energy lobbyist’s townhouse

Over the past 14 months, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has made it clear that he’s in bed with the industries that stand to benefit from his deregulatory efforts . . . just in a metaphoric sense, of course. On Thursday, however, a report from ABC News revealed he’s literally in bed with the energy industry, as in, because he’s been sleeping in one of its top lobbyist‘s homes.

For much of his first year in Washington, President Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt occupied prime real estate in a townhouse near the U.S. Capitol that is co-owned by the wife of a top energy lobbyist, property records from 2017 show. Neither the EPA nor the lobbyist, J. Steven Hart, would say how much Pruitt paid to live at the prime Capitol Hill address, though Hart said he believed it to be the market rate. The price tag on Pruitt’s rental arrangement is one key question when determining if it constitutes an improper gift, ethics experts told ABC News.

“I think it certainly creates a perception problem, especially if Mr. Hart is seeking to influence the agency,” Bryson Morgan, the former investigative counsel at the U.S. House of Representatives Office of Congressional Ethics, told ABC. Surely that’s not the case here at all.